


Aunt Nat and Uncle Phil

by jenna_thorn



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers: Age of Ultron
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-07
Updated: 2015-10-07
Packaged: 2018-03-30 16:28:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,887
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3943666
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jenna_thorn/pseuds/jenna_thorn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Reposting comment fic for archive purposes. </p><p>Nat and Phil know about Laura and the kids already.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Aunt Nat

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Laura's not SHIELD, but she's not a fool, either.

Laura paused. Clint hadn’t closed the door, because she could hear their voices. With the door shut, the office was soundproof. Probably EMP and alien proof, as well, but the lightning fast Internet came with a safe with no visible lock. She’d accepted that. Compromise and all that. Key to a marriage, so the magazines said.

“How can you do this, do what you do, what we do, then come home and pretend to be a farmer?”

“The amount of money I spend on seed says I am a farmer.”

“So what, the rest of your life is a job, the mask?”

“Natasha, I don’t wear a mask, this is me, _that_ is me, I’m just. I’m not pretending on either of them, okay?”

Laura stood still in the kitchen as Romanov strode out, radiating anger even though her feet barely made a sound. Clint followed more slowly, stopping to stand over the third place setting. 

“May just be us for dinner.”

“We’re twenty miles out of town.”

“She doesn’t need a greyhound station to …”

“Oh yeah, Janet Bond.” As though she’d forgotten.

He snorted. The pasta boiled. She gave it a stir.

“I love you,” he said. It wasn’t out of nowhere. She knew exactly where it came from.

“I know,” she answered. She tapped the timer. “Keep an eye on this. When it goes off, pull the bread out of the oven, okay? I left something outside.” He nodded, and she slid on her yard shoes.

She stood on the porch, hands on her hips, eyeing the trees surrounding the yard. The barn was a possibility, but it had a better view of the fields and the back of the house, and that wasn’t in mind. So either the road or the front of the house. She stared down the road for a moment; might be possible Miss Secret Agent walked, but if she did, it wouldn’t be on the dusty white rock. So Laura crossed to the side, the big tree that predated the new barn, but not the old one. She settled under it, sticks and dirt grinding into her jeans.

“Dinner’s almost ready,” she said to the open air, the house to her right, the barn farther off, the trees and the field and the cloudless blue sky.

“There’s a sniper platform up here.”

“Yup,” Laura answered. “And there’s one in the tree that faces the road, and the tree house has a roof that’ll support two men, and there’s a three by three floor above that. You can’t see it except in winter.” She looked down at her belly and smiled. The baby’s not born yet, but he had a treehouse with extra floors. “Also, the barn has a steel box I don’t have a key to, and the office upstairs has a safe, and behind the preserves, in the basement, the shelter? My granddad hollowed that out for tornadoes, my daddy, in the fifties, prepped it for when the Russians dropped the bomb. I suspect it’s a lot safer now than it was for either of them.”

“Clint and his renovations.”

“Second thing he did.”

“Not the first?”

“Roof had a hole. That was first.” She sighed, and began the multi-step process of levering herself off the ground. Hand on the tree for balance, one knee, then the other. It didn’t make sense that her center of gravity should be all wonked when she was barely showing, but go figure. “Dinner’ll be ready soon,” she repeated, dusting off her butt, and walked back into the house alone.

She opened the door to see Clint dumping noodles into the colander in the sink. She pulled plates, three of them, out of the cabinet, and he looked up at her in confusion, but filled all three, portioned out sauce, put them on the table.

As they sat down, the door opened, and Natasha crossed the room to wash her hands at the sink. She had a leaf in her hair, and somehow that made it easier for Laura to smile at her. “Do we say grace?” she asked.

Laura answered, “Others do. Varies house by house. We don’t.”

“It seemed appropriate for the venue.”

“Your research isn’t wrong, but there’s something to having a local guide. Pass the salad?”

Clint was staring at them both, so Laura scrunched her nose at him. That got a grin, as it always did, and she hoped always would, and he grabbed two pieces of bread and tapped the basket of it just enough to slide it past the center of the table. Natasha took one, paused for a moment, then took another, dropping them both into the puddle of sauce at the edge of her plate.

They ate in silence. She’d take it as a compliment to her cooking, if it were. Well, it was for Clint. He ate like he always did, like it was going to be taken away from him, but he tipped the basket, eyed the last piece of garlic bread, and offered it first to her, then to Natasha, who took it, ripped it in half and reached over to put the second half on his plate. Laura couldn’t keep from smiling. Clint had that effect on people. 

Clint bussed the table as Laura ran water in the sink. Natasha stood to join her and Laura waved her back to the table. “You’re a guest, sit.”

Natasha obeyed and Laura felt somehow like she was in the wrong. She remembered how hesitant Clint had been about bringing this woman, his work partner, to meet her and put that with the half-finished stories from the year before, adding in the supposedly unrelated conversations about self-imposed exile and second chances. “I mean, kind of a guest. Sister in law.”

“My research is wrong again. Sisters wash dishes.”

“Sister _-in-law_. And not for the first few years. Besides, I don’t know where anything is in _your_ kitchen.”

“True, very true.”

Laura had the plates and silver in the drying rack and was working on the baking sheet when Natasha stood to pull the towel off the oven door handle. “You need room.” She said, opening the silverware drawer and pulling the spoons from the rack.

“You know where everything goes in my kitchen, don’t you?” Janet Bond, she remembered.

“How much has he been able to tell you?”

“Not a lot. Generalities, or just the details without context. I don’t ask.”

“How can you not?”

“I don’t care.” She rinsed the sheet and handed it over. “Wait, no, I mean I do care, I’m not apathetic, I’m … just, good with what I’ve got. I don’t have any interest in working in his office, but he can’t do my job, either, and I wouldn’t want him to. Mostly because his spelling is creative at best and straight out of history at worst, complete with random capitals and a complete disregard for punctuation.” 

Natasha ducked her head to hide a smile, and slid the baking sheet into the drawer under the oven, the one that Laura had not opened in her presence. Janet Bond, indeed. Laura continued, “Right? So our office stories are my insane clients with 48 hour turnaround demands for a week’s worth of work and his are street food and the guy who tracks his fantasy football team from halfway around the world and complains when he’s interrupted. I don’t know what country they are in; I don’t know the guy’s name. He’s just fantasy football guy.” 

“Cheng.” Natasha nodded at the pot in the sink and Laura shook her head. 

“No, it’s gotta soak. What’s Cheng? 

“Fantasy Football guy. Cheng.”

“Don’t care. There’s you, The Boss, Phil Coulson, HBIC, Nurse Lollipop, and Gladys in the lunch room. Please don’t tell me what her actual name is. And a rotating series of techies, minions who give orders, all the asshole pilots who won’t let him fly the plane, who probably aren’t assholes at all. Oh, and some underage genius in R&D with a primate fetish. But he doesn’t know my clients, either, because to him they are Unreasonable Deadline, Adorable Non-profit, Idiot Non-profit, NASA Subcontract, and Those Fuckwads in Houston. And we’re okay with that.”

“HBIC?”

“Works for the boss – I’m pretty sure she’s at the same org chart level as Coulson.”

“No, what does the acronym –“

“Head Bitch in Charge."

“Oh.” Natasha’s eyes lit up. “Oh!” 

“Yeah, don’t tell me.”

“I may tell her.”

“Please don’t.”

Laura startled when Clint said from the doorway, “I’m going to regret letting you two meet, aren’t I?” His grin was soft, but Natasha’s was positively feral.

“Yup,” Laura answered.


	2. Uncle Phil

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> History tutor on call

\--::--

After mission, as the three of them are in an cargo compartment that doesn't show up on the manifest, Clint hands the burner back to Phil and takes, in return, his own phone, more advanced than he could ever have afforded. He swipes it open, thumbing in his passcode as he pulls off his shirt and drops it to the metal under his feet, glancing at the screen as he grabs the shirt Phil throws at him out of the air.

"Hey Phil?"

Phil looks up from where he's folding their torn and stained clothing. It's all going to be burned, and the whole damn pile reeks of blood and cordite, but by god, it'll be folded and neat going into the incinerator. Natasha chucks her bra at Phil's head, and he carefully folds it in half, tucking the straps to the inside, and adds it to the stack. Clint smiles despite himself, and asks, "Neville Chamberlain, Isolationist?"

"Traditionally appeasement rather than isolationism," Phil answers. "Although ..."

Clint raises one hand and thumbs at the screen with the other. "Sixth grade. Don't give me too much detail."

"I suspect I'm not giving you anything."

"Team effort. You know you love the "E" in team."

"Or the "A" in Sixth grade History."

"Yup."


	3. comment fic - unpolished

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> more headcanon than fic, but I thought it was amusing enough to share.

\--::--  
When Aunt Nat shows up, they know her as Aunt Nat of the pink and purple dress and Nat blinks and thinks, pink and purple? pink and purple? and she looks at Clint and he's got the oops! look around his mouth and she raises her eyebrows to silently communicate "You told your children about the time I needed to leave a hotel after strangling a diplomat and I stole a bridesmaid dress _off the bridesmaid_ and wore it through the parking lot to confuse security?" 

He shrugs and she rolls her eyes. "Yes, well, your father wasn't supposed to tell anyone about that."

And Callum pats her on the hand and gestures at Louise and says, "It's okay, Mommy kept a change of clothes for her in the trunk until last year. Accidents happen!"

"Especially around your father," Nat responds and Laura and the kids all nod solemnly.

It's not until after they leave that she realizes: the change of clothes in the trunk is less about bloodstains and more about potty training.

\--::--

I'm leaning toward the latter, where he comes out to see the farm in Lola, white dust up her sides and he steps out and Clint greets him at the door and says fresh eggs for lunch, c'mon! and it's not that Phil doesn't know where eggs come from, that'd be silly, but being faced with the still warm egg sitting there coated in mucus with hay sticking to it while Clint holds up the chicken and makes kissy faces at it is an entirely different thing.

So he keeps up his "oh, yay!" face and gathers eggs (and washes his hands. And washes them again.) and runs his checks, because that's why he's out there, to verify the safe room and secure office for Clint's telecommute. Dinner is asparagus and spinach omelets, everything fresh and from the farm except the salt and pepper and it is delicious and he gets back in Lola and hits the grocery store on his way home and stands in front of the butcher case with its plastic wrapped styrofoam portions of meat and thinks, "Oh thank _Heaven."_

Because whether he's from Chicago (Battle Scars) or Boston (AoS), he's a city boy, I think.

So Uncle Phil stories are mostly about the time they were playing baseball in the yard and mom had to sew his buttons back on, or the time that Uncle Phil brought a bunch of seeds for mom, isn't that a stupid gift (because frost resistant hybrids are not interesting to kids, though they are to moms) and real autographed football for Callum.

And the time when dad comes home and talks about how they had car trouble and rode horses to get home, because horses are fun, but fairly commonplace, but the idea of Uncle Phil *on* a horse is hilarious and calls for crayons and a picture of Uncle Phil, in his suit, sitting stiffly on a horse and Dad scans it and sends to off to Phil right then! And Clint never ever tells any of them that Phil was, in fact, unconscious from blood loss for most of emergency evac via stolen horses.


	4. Autumn meme prompt: Natasha & Laura/Clint

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> characterization in meme form.

**the meme**

Give me a pairing and I'll tell you who:  
\- Chooses the pumpkin  
\- Carves the pumpkin  
\- Gets scared and clings to the other in a haunted house  
\- Matching costume ideas  
\- Makes a cozy blanket fort to cuddle in  
\- Steals the others candy  
\- Accidentally gets lost in a corn maze  
\- Tells spooky stories to scare the other  
\- Collects cool looking leaves

\- Chooses the pumpkin

Laura drags Natasha to the far side of the Farmer's market, leaving Clint at the jack-o-lantern pumpkins. They spend thirty minutes loading up, as Laura explains that no, a sugar pumpkin is for pie and a lakota or golden is for roasting with turnips and picking out buttercup squash for dinner that night (soup inna shell because the kids love the idea (and so does Clint, but he uses the kids as cover) ), then return to Clint, who has picked out five pumpkins, two small and perfectly shaped, two larger and equally symmetrical, and a squashed, offset one with surface scars.

Natasha taps her finger against her lips after they've filled the truck with pumpkins. "The asymmetry gives more character to the carving," she says, not really a question, but inviting an answer. Clint nods, and says, "Yeah, that's true." 

they travel in silence for a while, and it's not until they turn off the highway onto the farm road that Laura says, "You haven't seen a Charlie Brown Christmas yet, have you?" Natasha blinks, Clint nods, and Laura says, "Okay, that's on the list next."

\- Carves the pumpkin

Everyone. It's a group project with individual results. The first year, Natasha's looks exactly like Laura's, down to the slightly offset quirk of its crenellated smile. The next year, as Laura is carving her traditional smiling face, Natasha is dragging the tip of her knife to make eyelashes and putting in a crescent moon shaped beauty mark. The next year, Natasha discovers shadow-work. 

The kids' contribution grows each year, from being allowing to scoop seeds to being allowed to use the flimsy plastic scrapers to carving under supervision. 

\- Gets scared and clings to the other in a haunted house

ahahahaha No. Laura hasn't been in a haunted house since she was 16 and punched the werewolf in the mask, because he did scare her. Clint works the kids area, juggling skull embroidered beanbags for princesses and sleepy-eyed pirates with plastic swords. Natasha mans candy stations and discourages pranksters. 

\- Matching costume ideas

Laura loves the idea of matching costumes. With deployment being what it is, she's usually handing out candy solo while Clint's costume sits in the closet. However, Clint and Laura were Dorothy and the Scarecrow one year. 

Natasha was Emma Peel the October after the battle of Manhattan. No one noticed. 

\- Makes a cozy blanket fort to cuddle in

Laura does the structural work, because Clint tends to slack off on things like balance and weight/height distribution, and no a lightweight pillow on a chair will not support the weight of two wool quilts and grab that! it's falling!

But Natasha is the one who crawls in first, and stays longest.

\- Steals the others candy

It's not stealing, it's sharing. Except for the Snickers Minis. Laura will cut you. 

\- Accidentally gets lost in a corn maze

There's no accident to it. The kids are on the hay ride and Clint missed so many teenager moments, you think Laura's not going to make out with him in a quiet dead end?

When they do eventually exit, Natasha hands over two caramel apples and flicks the hay out of Laura's hair with a smile. 

\- Tells spooky stories to scare the other

Nope. Laura doesn't ask; they don't tell. And the Hallowe'en movies they curl up together to watch are Laurel and Hardy meet the Mummy and nightmare before Christmas, and nothing with a rating higher than PG-13 

\- Collects cool looking leaves

Natasha, who brings them to Laura and they make wreaths, small ones, like Lucia crowns, the stems of the leaves wrapped and tied with sewing thread. And when Clint comes in and complains about spending all day raking only to find the kitchen table covered in mulch, they crown him and kiss his cheeks, one to each side.

**Author's Note:**

> Because I cannot bring myself to resent the introduction of another woman to the MCU.


End file.
